That’s the Way It Crumbles by Matthew Engel review – against the Americanisation of British English | Books
OK, here’s the thing. Maybe you like to think that you are a reliable user of the Queen’s English. You give slang a wide berth and never refer to anyone as a “guy†unless it happens to be the fifth of November. You don’t “do the mathâ€, not least because back in your day it was called “mathsâ€. Receiving an email that begins “Hi†makes you squirm and whenever you attempt to “kick ass†you worry about getting a call from the RSPCA.
Well done you. Not. For as Matthew Engel shows in this jaunty book, even the most pedantic Britons use Americanisms â€" words, phrases, pronunciations and spellings, but also that indefinable thing called cadence â€" 24/7. We can’t help it. Our ears are exposed to an American version of our mother tongue all day, every day â€" at work, at play and even in the deep cave of domesticity where we binge on Netflix and order take-out.
Don’t believe me? So far in this review I have already used at least 10 Americanisms. There are probably a whole heap more, but they are buried so deeply in the warp and weft of common British usage that I’m buggered if I can find them. (“Buggered†isn’t one of them, by the way, it’s properly British, which makes it all the more important to cherish it.)
Engel is keen to make the point that this isn’t an anti-American book. For two years he was the Guardian’s correspondent in Washington and clearly loves the place and the people, not to mention baseball, Breaking Bad and the work of Philip Roth. It was a love seeded during his 1950s Northampton childhood, a time when America was still a faraway land of slick talk and material plenty, sampled only at the movies or on a neighbour’s Louis Armstrong LP. But what Engel wants now is a return to that state of innocence when it was possible to feel a flutter of excitement at rolling “apartmentâ€, “elevator†or “garÄÄÄge†around on your tongue.
Linguistic purity, he insists, is not what he’s after: it’s difference that interests him, a resistance to the creeping monoculture that means that English now sounds the same, which is to say sounds American, wherever you go in the world.
Like many a nostalgist, Engel is determined to make his demands sound nuanced and reasonable. There was a time, he concedes, when it made sense for Britons to adopt words from the group of people known archly as “our American cousinsâ€. By the beginning of the 19th century, British English had been reduced to a feeble, feudal wheeze that had long lost the knockabout vigour of Chaucer. The Americans, by contrast, were busy minting expressions full of energy and colour (or “colorâ€, according to Webster’s Dictionary) to match their pioneering circumstances. So into British English, like an adrenalin shot, came “enthuseâ€, “greased lightningâ€, “go the whole hogâ€, “jackpotâ€, “pile it on†and, best of all, “vimâ€.
That didn’t mean there weren’t misunderstandings along the way. On his first trip to America in 1842, Dickens could write whole screeds of mildly amusing journalism about his failure to comprehend the intentions of a waiter who promised to fix him dinner “right awayâ€. Later, the pedants started weighing in and the mood turned nasty. Take the battle over “reliableâ€, a Yankee import over which much ink was spilled. In his 1864 book The Queen’s English, Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, spluttered “Reliable is hardly legitimate. We do not rely a man, we rely upon a man.†Alford suggested that “trustworthyâ€, with its sound British pedigree and its ability to stand tall without leaning on a preposition, “does all the work requiredâ€. But Alford was surely wrong: a person who turns up to work promptly every day but fiddles the petty cash is reliable but not trustworthy. So a case was grudgingly made for “reliable†to enter the British English lexicon, but not before being smeared as “cockney†and therefore not a word that any gentleman, that sine qua non of trustworthiness, would ever use.
Naturally, there was push-back and it came in a form that still gets used today whenever someone points to a word they don’t like and accuses it of being a blow-in. Reliable, it turns out, was used in Britain as early as 1569 before it emigrated to the United States, built up muscle, and made the return journey full of confidence and New World swagger. You can say exactly the same thing about “pocket-bookâ€, “I guessâ€, “gottenâ€, “fizzle†and “snarlâ€, all of which started life as olde Englishe â€" a “fizzle†was actually a Tudor fart â€" before heading west to seek their fortune.
The closer he gets to his own time, the less nuanced Engel sounds about the Americanisation of his mother tongue. His particular loathing is reserved for all that ugly business-babble that anyone who leads a vaguely modern life is subject to: information “cascading downâ€, “being proactiveâ€, “getting a handleâ€, “drilling down†to the “granular detail†and, worst of all, “going forwardâ€.
Even worse, as far as Engel is concerned, is the more general Americanisation of British culture: the narcissism of school proms, the sugar rush of trick or treating, the ugly wastefulness of Black Friday.
But just at the point when he is in danger of conflating too many things, of appearing like an old fizzle out of step with modern times, he finds a reason to be cheerful. In the autumn of 2013, the headteacher of a secondary school in Upper Norwood, insisted that her students could no longer use a list of banned words including “basicallyâ€, “bare†and “extraâ€. Apparently, these are all part of “multicultural London Englishâ€, or MLE, a polyglot of black British vernacular garnished with some white working-class slang, British South Asian phrases and the occasional dash of Polish and Somali.
The headteacher was worried that, by persisting in using MLE, her students were spoiling their chances at job and college interviews. Unless they could learn to talk proper â€" talk in Americanised English in other words â€" they risked exiling themselves from the modern world. But to Engel’s jaded ears MLE is glorious evidence of a youthful resistance to imported ready-made language in favour of something authentic and home-brewed. Never has “innit†sounded quite so close to poetry.
• That’s the Way It Crumbles is published by Profile. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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